Eric Schmidt, ex-Google CEO, said this at the University of Arizona’s commencement last week, as boos rang through the auditorium.
I wonder if he understood why students were booing? Are they afraid of AI replacing them? Well, some of them are yes, but not all of them, I believe.
Not AI itself. Not just job anxiety. But the framing itself.
“It is your turn to shape it (AI)”, he said, assumes the prior question has already been settled. The infrastructure is built. The architectures, which language gets treated as default, whose cultural context counts, whose consent is required and whose intentions are embedded, those decisions were made before the students entered the room.
What remains to “shape” is the adaptation layer.
In my research on AI systems, I document what I call designed fragilities: architectural choices that serve corporate interests while appearing as neutral technical constraints. These are not technical accidents. They are the society-building decisions, made upstream, before anyone asked “what kind of society do we want?”
Schmidt was right that the future isn’t finished.
But the structural foundations of that future were finished without the people now being told to “adapt.”
Another speaker at a different commencement put it more bluntly. Scott Borchetta, CEO of Big Machine Records, told graduates at Middle Tennessee State University: “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.” When the crowd booed, his response was simply: “Deal with it.”
From “shape it” to “deal with it” — the mask slipped. The students heard both statements clearly. This is not governance. It’s compliance enforcement, not regulation, not cooperation, but a unilateral directive from those who decided without asking anyone that the rest of us must accept what they have already built.
AI governance is not a technical problem that follows deployment.
It is a social design question that must precede it.
The boos weren’t fear.
They were a governance objection.
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